Guest Post: Mike Mullin: ASHFALL from Conception to Book Birthday and Giveaway

October 11th 2011, Tanglewood Press
466 pages, Hardcover
Young Adult

Under the bubbling hot springs and geysers of Yellowstone National Park is a supervolcano. Most people don't know it's there. The caldera is so large that it can only be seen from a plane or satellite. It just could be overdue for an eruption, which would change the landscape and climate of our planet.
Ashfall is the story of Alex, a teenage boy left alone for the weekend while his parents visit relatives. When the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts unexpectedly, Alex is determined to reach his parents. He must travel over a hundred miles in a landscape transformed by a foot of ash and the destruction of every modern convenience that he has ever known, and through a new world in which disaster has brought out both the best and worst in people desperate for food, water, and warmth. With a combination of nonstop action, a little romance, and very real science, this is a story that is difficult to stop reading and even more difficult to forget.

To help celebrate Rie’s birthday, here’s the story of the birth of my debut novel, ASHFALL.

The Conception: ASHFALL was conceived in the stacks of Central Library in downtown Indianapolis. Sadly, the conception wasn’t nearly as dirty as that sounds. I was wandering around the library one day and saw a display that included the oversized illustrated edition of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. I thought, yeah right, that’s a big book, but not nearly big enough to be a history of everything. So I checked it out, determined to discover what hubris led the publisher to choose that title. Dozens of novel ideas lurk within that book’s pages, but the one that stuck with me was the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano.

The Gestation: I woke in the middle of the night a few weeks later with a scene bursting from my mind. I wrote 5,500 words in a frenzy, finishing before dawn. Then I set the book aside for eight months while I finished the YA horror novel I was working on at the time. When I returned to the book after researching supervolcanoes further, I realized that the scene I’d written in the middle of the night was useless. Only one word of those 5,500 survived to the final draft: the title, ASHFALL.

The Ugly Baby: I wrote a query, agonized over it for a couple of weeks, rewrote it literally twenty-one more times, and finally sent it to a few agents. I had my first request for a full in less than 4 hours. Wow, this is easy, I thought. What’s all the online angst about? Yeah, well. I amassed 24 rejections over the next two months. No agent wanted my ugly baby. I did get a rewrite request with some valuable insights from Jim McCarthy at Dystel and Goderich. ASHFALL improved dramatically due to his generous advice, so all the time I spent querying wasn’t wasted.

The Beautiful Baby: In the meantime, my mother, who owns a children’s bookstore and teaches children’s literature to college students, was talking to everyone she knew about ASHFALL. One of the people she talked to was the owner/editor at Tanglewood Press, Peggy Tierney. Two weeks after I hit send on the email that zapped my manuscript to Peggy, I got “The Call.” She loved my beautiful baby, and wanted to give it a home at her publishing company. She’d even pay me for the privilege of publishing it. Yipee! I’ve been thrilled since at the passion and dedication the Tanglewood Press team has put into ASHFALL. No big publisher could do more or better promotion. And I learned a ton from the Tanglewood Author Retreat that Peggy hosted at her lovely home. If you’ve got a kick-butt children’s book to sell, I highly recommend Tanglewood. Here’s their submissions page.

The Baby Gets Lost in the Mail: One of the weird things about working with Tanglewood: they still work on paper. Hey, it’s not stone tablets, at least. So when I heard that the second round of substantive edits for ASHFALL was in the mail, I figured it’d arrive by Monday. I waited, and waited, and waited. Friday rolled around and the edits still hadn’t come. I called Tanglewood and discovered that the ONLY copy of the substantive edits were lost in the mail. So they had to be redone. The day after I got the redone version, I got a package from the Mail Recovery Center in Atlanta, Georgia with the tattered remains of the first round. Go figure.

The Baby Is a Star: There have been lots of wonderful reviews and a few bad ones. But the best moment so far was learning that my debut novel was awarded a Kirkus star! Kirkus advertises themselves as “The World’s Toughest Book Critics” and they mean it! Lots of authors go their whole career without getting a Kirkus star. Here’s mine. Go ahead. You can touch my shiny blue star. That’s why my monitor has a spot on it now. I touch my star all the time.

The Book Birthday: The official release date for ASHFALL is October 11, 2011. But if you preorder it, you may get it a little early. Here are a few links:
Autographed Copies
Indiebound
Amazon
Barnes & Noble

Happy birthday, Rie! And thank you for hosting me at your birthday party.

Categories: Ashfall, Guest Post, Mullin